Two weeks ago, The Dallas Express reported that Congresswoman Kay Granger, a Republican, has been living in an assisted care facility in Fort Worth. “It’s been a hard year,” the congresswoman’s son told The Dallas Morning News, sharing that his mother, who still currently represents Texas’s Twelfth District, has been having “some dementia issues.”
Granger is 81 years old. Her last vote in Congress was in July, and her office is reportedly shuttered—no one is answering the phone. A few have called for Granger’s government salary to be frozen considering she is representing constituents at bingo night rather than at votes on the budget in the House Chamber.
But if taxpayers don’t want to shell out for representatives’ later-in-life care, they may want to look into defunding all of Capitol Hill. In many of the offices there, the lights may be on, but no one’s home.
What makes me so sure? I spent some time on the Hill working as a Senate page when I was 16—attending what was essentially a boarding school for the uncoordinated. I spent my days for a semester gophering vote tallies around, and prepping senators’ desks with a lectern and a glass of water for when they decided to give a speech—or in the case of Senator Bernie Sanders, 83, two glasses, since he liked to give long speeches. I was 16, so even the thirtysomething staffers in the cloakroom struck me as old, but the senators, and many of the representatives, were positively ancient.
Aides, who all together make up the unelected legislature, would drop off congresspeople at meetings with a packed lunch, giving their elbow a squeeze before they left, letting them know when they’d be back to pick them up. Watching Harry Reid, who was tall and bony, walk down the marble hallway elicited the same feeling as when my grandmother treads over an icy sidewalk. Please don’t let me see something violent today.
In a scene that sapped my trust in government long before Fauci and Covid, I saw a senator become incontinent in a hallway. It was humiliating, and he had two staffers, one on each elbow, dragging him away.
Even on their sharpest days, the lawmakers would fall asleep and get confused. They needed canes and shoes with special ankle support and grip, and an aide—you rarely saw one without an aide—spotting them.
To be clear, aging is nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary. The eldest of the statesmen I worked for bore the scars of their place in American history. When I was a page, Daniel Inouye—at 86, the oldest senator at the time—wore a suit jacket with the right sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. He had lost his arm in World War II, after it was blown off by a grenade, and he kept fighting. He was part of an all–Japanese American unit who, after being interned, were all the more eager to prove their patriotism on the battlefield, which they did. John McCain, another hero, had limited mobility in his arms from the torture he suffered as a POW in Vietnam. They were living monuments.
But having served the country bravely doesn’t mean you have to serve until the cataracts take over. And Kay Granger is just the latest example of a phenomenon that exists on both sides of the handicap-accessible aisle. Strom Thurmond, who served as both a Republican and a Democrat, held on to his seat into his 100th year. Dianne Feinstein died trying. Mitch McConnell keeps showing up with bandages and bruises after falls. And was anyone particularly heartened when they saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg getting thrown around by a medicine ball in 2018, at 85? For the past year we cringed any time President Joe Biden went near a bike, or an Air Force commencement, or a journalist.
Senators are elected every six years, and given there are only two from each state, it’s harder for any of them to be unseated by a challenger once they have the job. Seeing it all go down is a live-action argument for term limits.
Holding on to power as the grim reaper approaches does not scream “muscular American leadership.” George Washington famously compared the upper chamber of Congress to a saucer, where laws would go to cool among men who are old and wise—for the time—before getting voted on. But I’d bet even Washington would be in favor of replacing the saucers every century or so.
